What happens on the Internet stays there

There’s an old saying that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. It’s usually just before someone tells you a story about something that happened in Vegas – or occasionally right after they’ve told you.

The point is, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas unless it’s an interesting enough story to be told elsewhere.

The same cannot be said of the Internet. That wondrous series of tubes that surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together has grown so complex and convoluted since its inception that no-one knows all the nooks and crannies. Well, almost no-one.

During the recent Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese authorities were very careful to ensure that the big, bad Internet didn’t get around to too many of its people.

Sites considered inappropriate for the locals to read – anything from Amnesty International to a pro-Tibet album on iTunes – were carefully and thoroughly blocked. Even clever and sophisticated types who know about proxy servers and whatnot were unable to find their way to the Forbidden Content.

Some journalists in Beijing were surprised to find their hosts were blocking Internet content. Those same journalists expressed disbelief upon being told that Joe Ratzinger is not, after all, a Lutheran.

The point is, the Chinese government is very good at making sure that information it doesn’t want known doesn’t get known.

It may surprise you that one of the members of the Chinese gymnastics team which blitzed all others was in fact 14 years old, and not the required 16 as stated on her government-issued passport. Cheating in sport – I was shocked, too. Where will it end? Lip-synching in the opening ceremony?

Of course if you search for the information in any of the official registries or Olympic websites you will find no evidence that any of the gymnasts were a day younger than they claimed.

Even if you try the time-honoured technique of trawling through the cache on Google or archived pages, there will be nought – tracks have been carefully covered.

The intrepid souls who uncovered this subterfuge found that, at some point, someone, somewhere had looked up some information on the gymnast in question, and had put the search results through an electronic translator on Baidu, the official Chinese Government search engine. The incriminating evidence was there in the translator’s cache.

Bear that in mind if ever you get the notion that you could hack into some computer somewhere and change any bit of information about yourself or someone else and have it go undetected. Or if you think you can simply remove some incriminating tidbit from a website and it will truly be gone. Even people who are really good at covering stuff up don’t know all the hiding places, so chances are reasonable you don’t either.

What happens on the Internet stays there forever.

Matthew JC. Powell swears it’s not him in that video, the birthmark is just a coincidence. Contact him on mjcp@optusnet.com.au

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